Another detachment of soldier ants flooded in. They were also relatively small, but their mandibles were venomous – so venomous that a tiny bite could cause a black worm to twitch twice and drop dead. With the battle now in full swing, the ant army moved from tooth to tooth, rooting out the black worms. Acidic smoke leaked from every cavity. A team of worker ants ferried the corpses out of the dinosaur’s mouth and deposited them on a leaf in its palm. Soon the leaf was piled high with dead black worms, many of them still smoking. Several other dinosaurs gathered around the Tarbosaurus, looking on in amazement.
Half an hour later, the last of the black worms had been purged and the battle was over. The Tarbosaurus’s mouth was filled with the strange taste of formic acid, but the dental complaint that had troubled it for most of its life was gone. It began to roar excitedly, sharing the miracle with all the dinosaurs present.
The news spread quickly through the forest and there was a dramatic spike in the number of dinosaurs visiting the ants. Some of them still wanted their teeth picked, but most came seeking treatment for dental ailments, because tooth decay was prevalent among carnivores and herbivores alike. On the busiest days, several hundred dinosaurs would congregate in the clearing, striding along carefully between great streams of ants. It was a bustling, prosperous scene. Accordingly, there was also a sharp increase in the number of ants who came to service the dinosaurs, and, unlike their patients, the ants, once arrived, rarely left. And so, what had started off as a normal-sized town exploded into a megalopolis of more than a million ants. It was called the Ivory Citadel and became famous as the first gathering place of ants and dinosaurs on Earth.
With the boom in business and the end of the dry season, the ants were no longer satisfied with scraps scavenged from between the dinosaurs’ teeth. Their clients began to pay for their medical services with fresh bones and meat. Since the ants of the Ivory Citadel no longer needed to forage for food, they became professional dentists. This specialisation led to rapid advances in the ants’ medical technology.
In the course of their anti-toothworm campaigns, the ants often travelled along the cavities to the roots of the dinosaurs’ teeth. At the junction of the teeth and the gums they found thick translucent pipes. When these pipes were touched, for example during combat, violent earthquakes would shake the dinosaurs’ mouths. Over time, the ants came to understand that stimulating these pipes caused the dinosaurs pain; later, they would call these structures nerves.
The ants had for a long time known of a certain two-leafed herb that could make their own limbs go numb – numb enough that they felt no pain when a leg was torn off – and that could also put them to sleep, sometimes for several days. They now applied the juice of this herb to the nerves in the roots of the dinosaurs’ teeth, and the consequence was that contact with the nerves no longer triggered earthquakes. The gums of dinosaurs with dental diseases were frequently septic, but the ants knew of another herb whose juice could promote wound healing. So they spread the juice of this herb across the ulcers on the dinosaurs’ gums, which closed up quickly.
The introduction of these two pain- and inflammation-reducing techniques not only enabled the ants to cure dinosaurs of toothworm infestations but also allowed them to treat other ailments not caused by the worms, such as toothaches and periodontitis. However, the real revolution in the ants’ medical technology was brought about by the exploration of the dinosaur body.
The ants were natural explorers, not out of curiosity – they were incurious creatures – but out of an instinctive urge to expand their living space. Every so often, while exterminating worms or pouring medicine onto a dinosaur’s teeth, they would peek into the abysmal reaches of its mouth. That dark, moist, interior world awakened in them a desire to travel into the great beyond, but fear of the attendant perils had always stopped them in their tracks.
The Age of Exploration of the Dinosaur Body was eventually ushered in by an ant named Daba – the first named ant in the recorded history of Cretaceous civilisation. After much preparation, Daba capitalised on the opportunity presented by a toothworm treatment and led a small expedition of ten soldier ants and ten worker ants into the dank depths of a Tyrannosaurus’s mouth.
Battling extreme humidity, the expedition began its traverse of the long narrow isthmus of the tongue. Tastebuds speckled the surface like a vast megalithic structure of slimy white boulders extending far into the gloom. The ant explorers picked their way between them. As the dinosaur opened and closed its mouth, light from the outside world streaked through the gaps between its teeth, flickering like lightning on the horizon and casting long, wavering shadows behind the tastebud megaliths. When its tongue squirmed, the entire isthmus rose and fell like a stormy sea, causing shifting ripples to appear in the megaliths. And every time the Tyrannosaurus swallowed, viscous floodwaters gushed in from both sides, submerging the isthmus and forcing the ants to cling to the tastebuds for fear of being swept away. It was the stuff of nightmares, but the dauntless ants patiently waited for the floodwaters to recede, then pressed on.
At long last they arrived at the root of the tongue. The light was much weaker there, barely illuminating the mouths of the two enormous caves before them. In one cave, a fierce gale howled, by turns sucking and then expelling the air, reversing direction every two to three seconds. There was no wind in the other cave, just a reverberant rumbling that rose from its invisible depths – a rumbling familiar to the ants from their time working on the teeth, but much, much louder, more like continual booms of thunder. This mysterious and terrible noise unnerved the ants more than the gale, so they decided to try the windy passageway. They would later learn that this was the dinosaur’s respiratory tract and that the scarily noisy passageway was its oesophagus.
With Daba in the lead, the expedition proceeded gingerly down the slick walls of the respiratory tract. When the wind was with them, they hurried forward several steps; when the wind was against them, it was impossible to walk, and they could only flatten their bodies and grip the wall tightly. They had not descended very far, however, before the tickle of their legs began to irritate the respiratory tract. With a slight cough, the dinosaur put an end to the ants’ first expedition. A hurricane of unimaginable force spiralled up from the bottom of the tunnel, sweeping the expeditioners off their feet and jetting them across the isthmus of the tongue at lightning speed. Some of them were hurled headlong into the dinosaur’s huge teeth, while others were blown straight out of its mouth.
Daba lost one of her middle legs in the failed expedition, but, unperturbed, she quickly organised a second attempt. This time she decided they would tackle the oesophagus instead. The preliminary stages went smoothly. The ants entered the oesophagus and began the long march down the seemingly endless and terrifyingly loud passage. Its creepy darkness was the least of their troubles, however, for the Tyrannosaurus had stopped beside a stream and now took a sip of water. The first the explorers knew of this was when they heard a great roar building behind them, a roar so loud that it rapidly drowned out the noise ahead of them. Daba immediately ordered the team to a halt, but before she could even begin to work out what was happening, a wall of water came cascading down the tunnel, hurtling past the ants, flinging them into its churn and propelling them at terrific speed all the way down the oesophagus and on towards the dinosaur’s stomach.